


Like Salt

by crowroad



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Americana, Apple Pie Life, Brotherly Love, Caretaking, Demon Blood, Fever, Fever Dreams, Hell, Hurt/Comfort, Memories, Men of Letters Bunker, Normal Life, Protective Dean Winchester, Purgatory, Quests, Season/Series 08, Sick Sam Winchester, Trials
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-19
Updated: 2015-03-19
Packaged: 2018-03-18 10:58:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3567140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowroad/pseuds/crowroad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a roadhouse off I-61 in Iowa they met a man who couldn't die, a shapeshifting waitress who liked to belt "Rock Salt and Nails", and another who could do all the dialogue from Pulp Fiction, backwards.</p>
<p>That was then.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Salt

_“Damn, says Crow, redemption_

_is not easy.”—Sherman Alexie_

In a roadhouse off I-61 in Iowa they met a man who couldn't die, a shapeshifting waitress who liked to belt "Rock Salt and Nails", and another who could do all the dialogue from _Pulp Fiction_ , backwards.

"Awesome cherry though," Dean said, when the salting's done, "I mean the cobbler. And did you see the rack on that..."

The words got lost in the wind, on the road to Thunderstorm Junction.

*****

That was then.

Now, fuzzy, Sam thinks I'm a, what, scholar, person of letters, not a warrior.

Oh but you are. The bunker's full of what feels like currents, everything aquarium-odd, wavering, Dean’s beaded soda can, plate of nachos, socks, books, old vinyl, aftermath.

Blood of a demon dog, black as oil.

“Lay low,” Dean said after the blood was off. “Rest. Get better.” He had a palm full of bullets and a cold one in the other hand, weapon-stroking, wired, nothing to kill but Saturday night.

Now Sam totters, blows his nose and bleeds, pushes off Dean's assist and sits, clicks at the keyboard awhile. Letters in search boxes look like glyphs, untranslated. His heart thumps, skips, pulse stabbing in his right eye.

He holds a palm over it until Dean looks at him and says, "Uh, cyclops? Why don't you lie down?"

*****

In Thunderstorm Junction, Iowa, there was a pigtailed, flour-handed, bakery-owning ghost. A carnival ground where the spirits of the living walked at night, happy to be halfway between. Funhouse, Ferris, mirrors, balloons, popcorn, nothing resembling a clown.

“More for you, sweetheart?” she said, the ghost, all shortening and sugar.

Well, look. Of course he wanted more. But you don’t eat where you, well, hunt. All the Mayberrys, all the apple pies rotten at the core, have taught them that.

You’ll kill things, god said, because it’s in the blood. Because your father and your mother and their fathers and mothers before them.

And how many things can you kill before you’re dead yourself, to all that makes you human, if you ever were. Who’s to say we’re not the monsters, the demons, is not a question you ask aloud, not if you want to live. You get righteous. You get like a blade.

His anger has always been a dagger, concealed, double-edged, aorta-shredding.

But never pure, never clean, never that.

*****

That was then. Or now, one neck-swivel later.

Sam hears his own eyelashes moving on the pillow, the mousetread of Dean websurfing next door, and lurches, runs to the can to retch awhile … cough and choke and stop and breathe and _oh_ and _fuck_. Can't puke up a tainted soul.

Well, until you can.

*****

“Sammy?” Dean’s calling, hand slapped flat to the door, “you alright in there?”

Something in the inflection (uncharacteristically delicate, trepidatious) reminds him: campus, supermarket, a broken jar, a bespectacled professorial type eyeballing the spatter.

“Young man, is that blood?”

“No,” Jess is laughing next to him, box of baking soda cupped in her palm, “it’s tomato sauce.” And he laughed too, so hard, at this version of blood and salt, at the sunshine and sea in Jess’s eyes, his ruined shirt, smiled at the sixteen-year old stockboy, red-headed, skinny as wire, turning the balanced broom widdershins on the splashed floor.

“Never going to get that stain out,” Jess said, leaned the groceries on her hip, laughed some more,”that poor kid was so nice about the broken glass.”

He kissed her then, faux-bloody, and later on, in his Russian Literature seminar, the professor read,

_“And the just man trailed God’s shining agent,_

_over a black mountain, in his giant track,_

_while a restless voice kept harrying his woman_

_It’s not too late, you can still look back…”_

_“_ Sam?”

"I'm fine,” he says to his brother, centuries and a fortress later, “just need to sleep.”

*****

It’s hard to think in simmering feverspace. He has a blanket the color of a forest and a brain strange as one, stunned not silent, after a storm. Paths through the roots. Insects beginning to buzz.

"Your face," Dean says.

"What's wrong with it?"

"Go look at yourself."

The mirror says his face-bones are winter branches, buds of flush creeping along them. Muddy marsh ha’nt under each eye. Abandoned-farmhouse haystack hair. Same as it ever was.

He lies down again.

Lets the pain work him over; knife, fist, purifying fire.

*****

In Thunderstorm Junction, they ate barbecue and fresh corn and the best ice-box cake ever and there were fireworks that didn’t make him cringe, spiders and streamers and weeping willows.

“Under the shiny-happy this place is all rattlesnakes and murder, man. Can’t you smell it?” Dean said.

For once, he couldn’t.

An angel (it was Cas) told him once that he was troubled, among other things.

Well yes but you can't long for the normal; it doesn't exist, like love at first sight and aliens and popular magic;enough hells and you don't long for what you can’t have, what you don't even know if you want, most of all if you'll ever be worthy of.

But in Thunderstorm, he didn't want to banish, didn't want to burn.

He only wanted to stay.

“Don't look back, Sammy,”Dean said, when they pulled out of town. 

He could feel the sweat still drying on the back of his neck, smell the sweet buttersalt and the hot crusts, awnings and lawns and weathered siding. Laughter and baseball and long Augusts; tea, mint, citronella, porches.

“Don't look back,” Dean said.

He didn't.

*****

He must have been talking in his sleep. He sleeps and sits up and can't talk at all. Shivers, sweats through his shirt, droops over the laptop and wakes up with a keyboard sigil on one cheek, stumbles to the bathroom again.

Dean snaps to and starts brothering him, cups and bowls and trays, simmered-down vegetables, herbs he normally wouldn't touch unless they were weaponized. Takes Sam’s temperature with the back of his hand. Swears. Tries to get him to swallow water, slow.

None of it seems relevant but he grips Dean's arm all the same, puts his weight on it.

One day, sanctified, he’ll dissolve in solution. Become nothing. Or not nothing, just, you know, diffuse.

There are worse ways to go.

*****

In the war room, brain radiating, he gets snippets from other years;static, snap-chatter from the past.

Dean, stirring something spicy on a camp stove: “That'll put a wave in your hair, or hair on your... whatever, just eat it.”

“Two angels walk into a bar. Bartender says..." Clink of bottles. Angelic laughter.

"Living in a hell-hole," Dean sings, well off-key, pounds the dash.

(It’s not funny if it's true. _Or if at any point it was true.)_

“What if I don’t want to be washed in the blood of the freaking lamb?” A little church, somewhere, definitely deconsecrated.

The roar of the engine, dusk: “Nothing but monsters from here to the Canadian border, it’s dark, and we’re wearing...”  Laughter, theirs.

His father’s voice, front seat of the car: “Keep that window up now; don’t you listen?”

Leaving Stanford, clean gold buildings and the bay, thinking, bitter and dumbstruck with grief, heart's a clean-swept hearth now, no-one close, no chance of hurting anyone, or less of one, anyway.

Desert blooms he saw once, on a long, infatuated road trip to Joshua. (Some of the most beautiful things ever there; the desert-clear Milky Way, cacti, roadrunners scratching in the sage.)

Sage burning.

A hundred and ten in the shade.

*****

"You," Dean says,"are on freaking fire." No way of telling, with them, if that's fever or hell, if it's then or now.

"Just hang on a minute." An emphatic  _fuck_. Hair lifted out of the way.

The bunker. Oh.

“Is this home?”

"Yeah, yeah; we’re home. You gotta quit this Human Torch crap, man. Don't think I'm gonna let you burn yourself up. Out. Whatever. Just quit it already."

Something cold, somewhere on his face. His skull is a topo map, mountains, rivers, monsters moving along in the valleys. _Covered wagons of the damned_ , he tries to say.

"Shut it now, alright?" Gentle.

Dean reads to him, quest tales, Camelot at Pentecost, flags whipping clean in the breeze, Tintagel, sea air, the pure-hearted at the castle gates. 

That was then.

*****

Demon blood is acidic, addictive, corrosive.

He dreams himself a mantra:  _fixity, volatility, inflammability_ , the alchemical holy trinity.

Not a cure.

*****

In purgatory, the wind smells like blood, trepidation, corpse-ash, burnt bones. He was running, that’s what you do there, run, try not to crack the wrong twig, not hearing a single birdcall before the portal sucks you down into what man has wrought for himself: a dungeon. And the air in hell burns all the alveoli, leaves him hacking, or would, if he didn’t tread so carefully, hold himself enough apart, think about the mundane, cabs that pick you up and take you to the airport, not ones that roll until another world opens, one you don’t even want to go to. Whisper that he isn’t who anyone thinks he is, (just a guest here, just passing through);he isn’t even who _he_ thinks he is, until he sees Bobby’s face and falls into his body with sick jolt.

That’s how love feels, when you’re in hell.

Or that’s how it always feels, always does.

“Sammy?” Dean says. His hand’s heavy, mineral-cold, features a constellation.

“Yeah,” he says, twists in the bed, points up at the bunker-ceiling sky, “look there.”

Once they leaned on the hood of the car and looked at stars, one time in particular, outside of Brownsville; Texas-tequiled and listening to the engine tick cool, killing done.

Corvus in the southern sky, visible to Mexico. He pointed, told Dean: _Crow used to be white, until Apollo got pissed off and scorched him, dip-dyed him in soot, took away his voice, stuck him in the sky on the back of a snake. Good story._

"Yeah,” Dean said, bordertown sleepy, the most content he ever gets, “aren’t they all.”

“Hey,” Dean says, palms his face, “we're home, in Kansas. Where in the hell are you?”

*****

Thing is, suffering is an offense, no matter who’s doing it.

“My eyeballs are on fire,” he says.

“Copy that,” Dean says, rough, worried, and Sam remembers, the clutch that pulled him from the granite-scented Maine woods, carried him home. His blanket sparks a little, looks like, at the edges, sends up a gasp of pale smoke.

“Give me a hunter’s funeral,” he says, though that’s not what he wants, sees flashes, a circle of salt, holy fire,whole families falling from the sky, flocks of crows, pines like ones in purgatory, not of this earth.

“Aw man,” Dean says, “don’t talk like that.” Feels his pulse. “I’m not shutting the door on you, ever. You hear me? We’re gonna shut the door on _them,_ all the evil bitches and their sons and their sisters and their grandmothers.For good.”

“You know how," Sam says, earnest now, clutching a sleeve, “and where.”

Don’t forget the stories, the real ones, ours, not myth or gospel or lore but flawed human truth. That belongs in the library too.

Don’t forget the ritual, when it's all done.

S _alt, bones, earth, tears, fire; ashes to ashes to ashes to dust._

*****

At Thunderstorm Junction, there were actual storm clouds. They stood at the crossroads and let the summer wind take their frayed jackets. Just a crossroads, for once, clean and plain and pure, with green corn on all sides and the sky vaulting up and away.

What if, he thought, Dean next to him on the empty road, scent of dirt and imminent thunder, what if there’s nothing truly right and good in this world? What if I never can be? 

How do we know what to kill (ghost, demon, our old selves, our old souls) and what to save. 

*****

Dean’s asleep in a chair next to the bed when he blinks up, gets up coughing, lays himself out on the bathroom floor, not quite a sacrifice. It’s cold. Roots. A faint demon-scent, brimstone and ash. He catches on the insides of his eyes a montage of cut and cure, smokeouts, killstrokes, daggers and icepicks and angel blades, opens them to a tableau shimmering in the ecliptic of the ceiling.

For an instant they're all there, he and Dean and John and Mary; the Winchesters are a nuclear family, normal, the only monsters the same ones other people have under their beds, in their closets, in their sweet-bricked basements and backyards, middle America white-picketing them in its windswept palm. Then it's gone, the vision, a painful prick of light and he sees the car, their old home, safehouse, moving fortress in the vast wilderness of this haunted country, this war-torn universe. She turns left, pulls free of yet another Main Street and heads out into the big empty, and he blinks again and there's only the white tile and the world to come, the door clicking open and the sound of kneeling. His brother's hands land on either side of him, everything moving but soft, falling, don't-look-back-now, like salt, or stars.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> "But the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt."-- Isaiah 57:20
> 
> The poem Sam's professor reads is Anna Ahkmatova, [Lot's Wife](http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/lots-wife)


End file.
